NIST and DARPA Working on Language Translation Devices for U.S. Troops

Dr. John Ohab is a new technology strategist at the Department of Defense Public Web Program.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Defense Department are collaborating on voice translation technology that at one time seemed only possible in Star Trek.

According to a story on the NIST website, a team of NIST scientists have spent the last four years evaluating cutting-edge speech translation technology for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The NIST scientists evaluated three two-way, real-time, voice-translation devices designed to improve communications between the U.S. military and non-English speakers in Afghanistan.

The DARPA project, called TRANSTAC (spoken language communication and TRANSlation system for TACtical use), currently focuses on Pashto, a native Afghani tongue, but NIST has also assessed machine translation systems for Dari—also spoken in Afghanistan—and Iraqi Arabic.

The story also details exactly how DARPA’s TRANSTAC systems actually work:

All new TRANSTAC systems all work much the same way, says project manager Craig Schlenoff. An English speaker talks into the phone. Automatic speech recognition distinguishes what is said and generates a text file that software translates to the target language. Text-to-speech technology converts the resulting text file into an oral response in the foreign language. This process is reversed for the foreign language speaker.